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1 1 So Much to Read, so Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Keith Rayner 1, Elizabeth R. Schotter 1, Michael E. J. Masson 2, Mary C. Potter 3, and Rebecca Treiman 4 1. Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego 2. Department of Psychology, University of Victoria 3. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4. Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis Correspondence to: Elizabeth R. Schotter Department of Psychology University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA,

2 2 Abstract The prospect of speed reading reading at an increased speed without any loss of comprehension has undeniable appeal. Speed reading has been an intriguing concept for decades, at least since Evelyn Wood introduced her Reading Dynamics training program in It has recently increased in popularity, with speed reading apps and technologies being introduced for smartphones and digital devices. The current article reviews what the scientific community knows about the reading process a great deal and discusses the implications of the research findings for potential students of speed reading training programs or purchasers of speed reading apps. The research shows that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. It is unlikely that readers will be able to double or triple their reading speeds (e.g., from around 250 to words per minute) while still being able to understand the text as well as if they read at normal speed. If a thorough understanding of the text is not the reader s goal, then speed reading or skimming the text will allow the reader to get through it faster with moderate comprehension. The way to maintain high comprehension and get through text faster is to practice reading and to become a more skilled language user (e.g., through increased vocabulary). This is because language skill is at the heart of reading speed.

3 3 One day in 2007, six-time World Speed Reading Champion Anne Jones sat down in a popular bookstore on Charring Cross Road, London and devoured the latest Harry Potter book in about 47 minutes. That worked out to a reading rate of over 4,200 words per minute. She then summarized the book for some British news sources. Another speed reading enthusiast and promoter, Howard Berg, professes to be able to read as many as 30,000 words per minute. Reading rates of this kind seem extraordinary, given that college-educated adults who are considered good readers usually move along at about 200 to 400 words per minute. Given the immense volume of text available to us on a daily basis, it is unsurprising that most people would like to increase their reading rates to that of Jones or Berg. But is this possible? Some people suggest that it is: proponents of speed reading courses claim that we can dramatically increase our reading speed without sacrificing our understanding of the content by learning to take in more visual information at a single glance and by suppressing the inner speech that often occurs when we read silently. And now that text can be presented more dynamically, on digital devices as opposed to paper, there are claims that new methods of text presentation can allow us to read more quickly and with good understanding. The most popular of these technologies presents words rapidly one at a time on a computer screen using what is called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). The claim is that, freed from the need to move our eyes, we can read more quickly than we normally would. Other technologies use color to present lines of print, claiming that this can help us to reduce skipping or repetition of lines. Is there a unique form of reading in which speed and comprehension are both high? Can we learn to read in this way through speed reading courses, or can we achieve it with little or no practice by using special technologies? In this article, we address these questions. We begin by reviewing psychological research on normal reading and then discuss and evaluate methods that

4 4 aim to increase reading speed. We adopt this approach because we believe that it is important to understand the visual and mental processes that occur in typical silent reading before determining whether special training or technologies can allow us to increase speed without sacrificing comprehension. Therefore, the first section of this article will review research on normal silent reading, focusing on those research findings that are most important for evaluating claims about speed reading. We will then consider the research on RSVP, the procedure that is used by some currently popular speed reading technologies. With this background in place, we will evaluate speed reading courses and technologies. As we will see, research shows that there is not a unique and easily learned behavior in which reading speed and comprehension are both high. There are effective ways of skimming a text to quickly find specific information, and skimming may suffice if complete and detailed comprehension of the text is not a priority. Reading can also be improved through practice. However, there is no quick and easy procedure that can allow us to read a text more quickly and still understand it to an equivalent level as careful reading. You will see why this is the case as we review what is known about normal reading. Reading, Skimming, and Speed Reading Before we embark on a discussion of research on normal reading and its implications for speed reading, we must provide a definition of reading. Reading is typically defined as the processing of textual information so as to recover the intended meaning of each word, phrase, and sentence. Of course there are some forms of literature where the author intentionally provides some level of ambiguity. For the most part, though, authors would like their readers to understand what they intend to communicate and to understand all of the words in the text. Often, the goal of reading is to learn something new, whether it is a fact from a textbook, a story

5 5 from a novel, or instructions from a manual. Successful reading thus requires more than recognizing a sequence of individual words. It also requires understanding the relationships between them and making inferences about unstated entities that might be involved in the scenario being described. Reading can be contrasted with skimming in which the goal is to quickly move one s eyes through the text to find a specific word or piece of information or to get a general idea of the text content. As we will discuss later, skimming rates can be as much as two to four times faster than those of typical silent reading. Comprehension rates, however, are lower when skimming than when reading, suggesting a trade-off between speed and comprehension accuracy. Where does speed reading fall on the reading skimming spectrum? Our brief discussion of trade-offs between speed and comprehension suggests that a reader cannot have his cake and eat it too in the sense that comprehension must necessarily suffer if the reading process becomes more like skimming. Indeed, we will see there is little evidence for a unique behavior, speed reading, in which speed and comprehension are both high. The Reading Process To understand whether reading can be dramatically sped up while maintaining comprehension, it is important to understand how reading normally occurs. In this section, we review the visual and mental processes that are involved in silent reading when it proceeds as it typically does in educated adults, at a rate of about 200 to 400 words per minute. Throughout the course of this discussion, it is important to keep in mind that reading is based on language; it is not a purely visual process. Speech is the primary form of language, and all human societies have a spoken language. (Groups of people who are deaf have developed languages that use the visual modality, but the primary languages employed by people with normal hearing all use the

6 6 auditory modality.) We begin learning about our spoken language as babies, and this process does not require explicit instruction. Reading and writing, which are relatively recent cultural inventions that are used in only some societies, normally require explicit instruction. That instruction begins around the age of 6 in many societies, although there are variations across cultures. It takes many years for a child to become a proficient reader. At first, children often read aloud, converting a printed text into the more familiar spoken form. Children gradually improve in their ability to read silently. Even in cultures in which reading is highly valued and widely taught, some children and adults never become good readers. These observations indicate that speech is the basic form of language; reading and writing is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on (Pinker, 1997, p. ix). Even though reading can be considered an unnatural act (Gough & Hillinger, 1980), many adults in modern societies perform this act quite skillfully. The body of research we now discuss has shed light on how they manage to do so. Writing Systems A logical starting point for reviewing the mental and visual processes involved in reading is to consider what the eye takes in and what the cognitive system must then process: the elements of writing system. Writing normally takes the form of visible marks on a surface, whether it is a clay tablet, a sheet of paper, a computer monitor, or another digital screen. In most languages, written words are composed of smaller visual units that can be combined in various ways. The basic written symbols of English and other alphabetic writing systems are letters, which approximately represent the sounds of the language, the phonemes (Figure 1). For example, the word bag is represented by using a letter that represents the b sound, a letter that represents the a sound, and a letter that represents the g sound. The letters are arranged left

7 7 to right along a horizontal line in the case of English, but other writing systems use other arrangements. For example, Hebrew arranges its symbols horizontally from right to left. Figure 1. Diagram representing the orthographic (letter-based), phonological (sound-based), word, and conceptual representations of bag. In some writing systems that are not alphabetic, the individual symbols that are arranged along a line represent units of meaning, morphemes, rather than units of sound. For example, the Chinese character 人 stands for person. Some Chinese characters contain components that provide a hint about the character s pronunciation. However, these hints are not always present and, when present, are not always consistent or helpful. Most modern Chinese words contain more than one unit of meaning and must be expressed by a sequence of characters. For example, when the characters meaning ground ( 地 ) and board ( 板 ) are written together they convey the meaning floor ( 地 板 ). In Chinese, there are no spaces between any characters so the only way a reader knows which two characters go together in a word is because of their experience. For the most part however, this does not cause a problem for skilled readers. The symbols of modern writing systems require no shading, no color other than that needed to distinguish the writing from the background, and no meaningful distinctions between

8 8 lighter and darker lines or between wider and narrower lines. Once a symbol has been learned, it can be recognized in many printed forms. This use of abstract codes rather than visual templates (McConkie & Zola, 1979) helps to explain why we are able to recognize printed and printed as representing the same word even though they are physically somewhat different. Despite the fact that letters are recognized by their abstract forms rather than visual templates, good visual acuity is required to pick up the critical differences between the marks that distinguish visually similar letters, for example the difference between h and n. If this difference is not perceived, one could mistake hot for not. Because discerning the correct visual form of words is an important precursor to the rest of the reading process, we now turn to a discussion of visual processing and the role of eye movements in reading before moving on to deeper aspects of the reading process: identifying words and understanding meaning. Visual Processing and Eye Movements Given that writing is composed of fine lines and marks, the acuity (visual resolution) limits of vision are an important constraint on the reading process. The premise behind some speed reading courses is that it is possible to use peripheral vision to simultaneously read large segments of a page, perhaps even a whole page, instead of one word at a time (Brozo & Johns, 1986). However, such a process is not biologically or psychologically possible. One indication that it is not possible is that visual acuity is limited and that these limitations are what cause readers to make eye movements. Acuity is much higher in the fovea (from the center of vision the fixation location to 1 degree of visual angle away from it in any direction) than in the parafovea (1-5 degrees away from the center of vision) or periphery (areas more than 5 degrees away from the center of vision; Balota & Rayner, 1991; Figure 2). To get a sense of how small

9 9 the foveal viewing area is, note that it is roughly equivalent to the width of your thumb held at arm s length from your eye. Figure 2. Diagram of the relationship between visual acuity and the three regions of the visual field. Acuity decreases continuously as a function of distance from fixation location. The visual field consists of the fovea (center with highest acuity), parafovea (middle region with moderate acuity), and periphery (furthest region from fixation with lowest acuity). Saccades (quick, ballistic eye movements) allow readers to move the fovea to the word they wish to process with the highest efficiency. Therefore, the oculomotor (eye movement) system controls the sequence and timing of the visual system s access to the text. Decisions about how long to fixate a word and when to move the eyes to the next word are to a large extent under the control of cognitive processes (Rayner, Liversedge, White, & Vergilino-Perez, 2003; Reingold, Reichle, Glaholt, & Sheridan, 2012; see Rayner & Reingold, 2015). They are not preprogrammed before beginning to read a text in the way that a musician might set a metronome before beginning to practice a piece of music. This moment-by-moment control helps to ensure that the next word enters the system through foveal (high resolution) vision with the optimal timing. In the following sections, we detail how the visual and oculomotor systems support and constrain the reading process. The visual system. As mentioned, acuity is highest in the fovea and this is the area in which the majority of word recognition occurs. One reason that acuity is higher in the fovea than

10 10 in other areas of the visual field is related to the distribution of two types of neural receptors that respond to light rods and cones. Cones are sensitive to color and detail and are more effective in bright light, while rods are sensitive only to brightness (e.g., shades of grey) and motion and are mostly sensitive (i.e., useful) in dimly lit rooms or at night. Cones are concentrated in the fovea and decrease in density with increasing distance from fixation. Rods are least concentrated in the fovea and increase in density with increasing distance from fixation (Figure 3). Because cones are more sensitive to detail, this means that acuity is higher in the fovea, where there are more cones, than in non-foveal areas. Figure 3. Diagrams of the distribution of rods (grey dots) and cones (red, yellow, and blue dots) across the visual field and retina. Another reason why acuity is higher in the fovea than in other areas of the visual field has to do with the way information is transmitted from rods and cones (located in the retina a membrane lining the back of the inside of the eyeball) to the brain. Information from rods is pooled (averaged across a group of rods) before being relayed to the brain, while information from an individual cone is relayed directly, without being combined with information from other cones (Figure 4). The consequence of this organization is that even minute variations in the pattern of light hitting the fovea will be preserved by the cones. If one cone receives bright light and an adjacent cone receives very dim light, the brain will perceive a light/dark boundary. In

11 11 contrast, minute variations in the pattern of light hitting non-foveal areas (where cones are sparse and there are mostly rods) will be obscured. If one rod receives bright light and an adjacent rod receives very dim light, the brain will perceive a grey blob. Figure 4. Diagram of how information is relayed from the retina to the brain. Information from cones (top panel) is relayed directly through bipolar cells to ganglion cells and onward to the brain, whereas information from rods (bottom panel) is pooled (averaged) through bipolar cells and ganglion cells. These facts about rods and cones have some important implications for reading. As we have discussed, all text, regardless of writing system, is comprised of combinations of lines, normally dark on a white background. Therefore, fine discrimination between dark and light areas is essential to recognizing the visual elements of writing. If the light pattern coming from a word hits the fovea, the cones will easily recognize such fine detail and relay the pattern with high fidelity to the brain. However, if the word hits non-foveal areas and is sensed primarily by rods, it will be relayed to the brain as an average and will appear fuzzy. This will make it difficult to discern the exact identities of the symbols (see the beginning and end of the sentence represented in Figure 2). In fact, when people are asked to report the identity of a word that is presented so briefly that they cannot make an eye movement, accuracy is high in the fovea and drops off dramatically, with performance reaching chance levels around the middle of the parafovea (approximately 3 degrees of visual angle away from fixation, Bouma, 1973; see also

12 12 Bouma, 1978; Rayner & Morrison, 1981). These facts cast doubt on suggestions from speed reading proponents that people can read more effectively by using peripheral vision, taking in an entire line or even an entire page at a time. Eye movements. For over a century, researchers have been monitoring eye movements in order to study the cognitive processes underlying reading. The technology has evolved over the years so that eye tracking can now be achieved with a high-speed video camera connected to a computer and can be used to study readers of any age. In general, these technologies work by computing the location of the eye up to one thousand times per second, allowing the researcher to know, with millisecond precision, which word and where in the word the reader is looking at a particular time. This information can then be separated into times where the eyes remain in the same location (i.e., during fixations) and times when they move between locations (i.e., during saccades). In this section, we review what has been discovered in studies of experienced adult readers, generally college students, who are reading silently in their first language. As mentioned earlier, the reason readers make saccades is to move their fovea to the next word. The eyes are relatively stable during fixations, which last approximately 250 ms for experienced adult readers. In general, no new visual information is obtained during saccades (Matin, 1974), but cognitive processing continues during this time (Irwin, 1998). This is important because some speed reading technology developers have claimed that saccades waste time. However, because cognitive processing continues during saccades, this time is not wasted. We can conclude, however, that fixations are the reader s opportunity to obtain new visual information from the text. Although the average fixation lasts about 250 ms, there is considerable variability in how long an individual fixation lasts. These variations reflect such things as the legibility of the text (e.g., light/dark contrast, filled-in or removed spaces between words),

13 13 linguistic difficulty (e.g., word frequency, predictability, ambiguity), properties of the reader (e.g., age or reading skill), and task goals (e.g., reading, proofreading, skimming). One reason that fixations last as long as they do is that eye movements are a motor response that requires time to plan and execute. For example, even in the simple task of moving the eyes to a new stimulus that appears either on the left or on the right of the eye s current location, the reaction time is in the range of 100 to 1000 ms, depending on the stimuli and experimental conditions (see Gilchrist, 2011). The reaction time in reading is in the shorter end of this range, 150 to 200 ms, because the eyes generally move in one direction (Becker & Jürgens, 1979; Rayner, Slowiaczek, Clifton, & Bertera, 1983). Additionally, a number of processes are being conducted at once: processing of the fixated word, planning to move the eyes forward, and processing of the upcoming word using parafoveal information all overlap in time. This means that saccade latencies in reading can be shorter than in simple saccadic reaction time tasks because some of the cognitive processing that leads to the decision of when to move the eyes can occur before the fixation on a particular word even begins. Forward saccades last on average about 20 to 35 ms and span the distance of, on average, 7 letters when reading English. Saccade durations, like fixation durations, are variable. But the variation is mostly determined by the distance traveled rather than by the cognitive and linguistic variables that affect fixation durations (Rayner, 1998, 2009). Saccades usually move from one word to the next word. However, about 30% of the time readers move past the next word to the following one. These skips are more likely to happen when the word is very short, extremely frequent, and/or highly predictable from the prior context. The word the has these characteristics, and it is skipped about 50% of the time or more (see Angele & Rayner, 2013). Importantly, just because a word is skipped does not mean that it was not processed at all. All major theories of

14 14 reading posit that word skipping is based on at least partial recognition of the word from information obtained in parafoveal vision and/or expectations about the word s identity. In fact, if readers are given passages to read in which words that most people skip over are omitted, comprehension suffers rather dramatically (Fisher & Shebilske, 1985). This shows that readers are actually processing many or most of the words they skip over, along with the words they fixate. It also suggests that every reader is unique in terms of the timing and sequence of words they need to directly look at in order to read efficiently. What works for some people the initial readers in Fisher and Shebilske s study does not work for others the readers who got the modified text. The implication is that speed reading devices that control the timing of word presentation may not be ready to use out of the box but instead may need to be tailored to each individual user with knowledge about how that person would naturally process the text. Not all saccades move forward to the next word in the text (Figure 5). A small proportion of eye movements result in refixations on the same word. Refixations are most common for long words, over about 6 letters long in English, for which the end part of the word may not fall within the word identification span (described later). About 10 to 15% of the time skilled readers make regressions, moving backward in the text to a previous word. Regressions are different from return sweeps eye movements that go from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next. Although return sweeps and regressions are both right-to-left movements in writing systems that go from left to right, like English, return sweeps continue to move forward with respect to the progression of the text whereas regressions move backward.

15 15 Figure 5. Schematic diagram of eye movements during reading. The forward saccades are represented by solid gray lines, a skip is represented by the small dotted green line, a return sweep is represented by the large dashed blue line, a regression is represented by the sparse dotted red line, and a refixation is represented by the medium dashed yellow line. Because return sweeps tend to be long saccades, there is some error in where they land, sometimes requiring an additional fixation to correct (Just & Carpenter, 1980). In general, though, these corrective saccades take half the time that normal saccades take and do not disrupt the reading process too much (in fact, readers almost never notice them). Some color-based technologies for presenting text have recently been developed that aim to make it easier to make return sweeps. However, as we will discuss in more detail later, return sweeps and other aspects of oculomotor control are generally not the difficult part about reading. Faulty language processing generally causes problems in eye movement programming, not the other way around. Regressions are more important than return sweeps with respect to understanding reading because they constitute a deviation of the reader s eye movements from the normal progression of the text. Although some regressions are made to correct for oculomotor error (e.g., the eye landing too far past the intended word), many regressions are made to correct a failure in comprehension (e.g., when the reader has misinterpreted the sentence). This is important in the context of speed reading technologies that use RSVP because these technologies do not allow people to reread the text to correct misunderstandings. Given that most backward eye movements are made in order to repair a failure in comprehension, readers would maintain misinterpretations

16 16 if they forced themselves to keep moving forward and would comprehend the text less well (Schotter, Tran, & Rayner, 2014). The use of foveal and parafoveal information to process text. Now that we have reviewed the characteristics of eye movements, we return to the issue of how information is obtained from a text once an eye movement is made. Visual perception occurs very rapidly so rapidly, in fact, that even if a word disappears completely after only 60 ms of directly looking at it, reading behavior is unaffected. That is, fixation durations were similar regardless of whether the word remained visible or was erased or masked after 60 ms (Ishida & Ikeda, 1989), and the durations continued to be sensitive to linguistic properties of the fixated word in both cases (e.g., how common it is; Rayner et al., 2003). These findings suggest that visual perception takes up only a small fraction of fixation durations, leaving time for higher level cognitive and linguistic processing to occur before the decision of when to move the eyes next. Crucially, the finding that readers eyes remained on words that had disappeared for as long as they would have when the words were still there suggests that the reading system naturally delays looking directly at the next word until it has performed a certain amount of linguistic processing of the currently fixated word. Therefore, devices that present the words faster than the natural pace may run the risk of presenting a word before the brain is prepared to process and understand it. Although acuity is lower in the parafovea than in the fovea, information in the parafovea is not completely ignored. If the word to the right of the fixated word disappears after 60 ms, reading behavior is disrupted (even if the word reappears once it is directly fixated; Rayner, Liversedge, & White, 2006). This finding suggests that readers use information from more than just the fixated word in order to read efficiently. This is important in light of speed reading

17 17 technologies that present just one word at a time: they do not allow the opportunity to use information from the next word. A different way to determine how much is seen in a single fixation is to examine eye fixations when readers can see clearly only a limited window of text that moves as the eyes move, using the gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; see Rayner, 2014 for a review). In this paradigm, the reader s fixation location is monitored and the text is manipulated based on the position of the eye (Figure 6). The letters immediately surrounding the center of fixation are revealed, forming a window of clear text. Each of the letters outside the window, in some studies including the spaces, is replaced with x. On different trials the window may be small (e.g., as small as a single letter) or large (e.g., 40 letters). The experimenter measures reading rate as a function of window size. The general finding is that reading rate increases as the window size increases until it reaches an asymptote, the point at which reading rate is equivalent to that with a completely visible line. The window size at the asymptote point represents the size of the reader s perceptual span. In general, in English the size of the perceptual span is 3-4 letter spaces to the left of fixation (McConkie & Rayner, 1976; Rayner, Well, & Pollatsek, 1980) and letter spaces to the right of fixation (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; Rayner & Bertera, 1979).

18 18 Figure 7. Diagram of the moving window paradigm with a 9-character window. From top to bottom, the lines show successive displays of an example sentence. The center of the blue rectangles represent the locations of fixations and the size of the rectangles show the size of the window. The perceptual span is not determined by physical space or the distance traveled by the eyes, but rather by the amount of linguistic information that can be obtained from the text. This fact is demonstrated in several ways. First, the distance the eyes move during a saccade is equivalent (when measured in terms of number of letters), regardless of the distance or size of the text (Morrison & Rayner, 1981). Second, across languages, there are differences in the size and shape of the perceptual span. In Chinese it is 1 character to the left and 3 to the right (Inhoff & Liu, 1998), and it is larger to the left than to the right in both Hebrew (Pollatsek, Bolozky, Well, & Rayner, 1981) and Arabic (Jordan et al., 2014). These differences reflect differences in the languages and writing systems. The asymmetry of the perceptual span is reversed in Hebrew and Arabic compared to English because Hebrew and Arabic are read right to left and English is read left to right the perceptual span is larger in the direction of reading compared to where the reader has already been. The perceptual span in Chinese is smaller than in English because words are shorter in Chinese (mostly 2 characters) than in English (on average, about 5 letters). The

19 19 size of the perceptual spans is equivalent when measured in number of words instead of number of characters, suggesting that there may be a generally optimal rate of uptake of linguistic information that is more or less consistent across languages. Third, the asymmetry of the perceptual span switches toward the direction of the eye movement when readers make regressions (Apel, Henderson, & Ferreira, 2012). Thus, the size of the perceptual span is not a physical limitation; otherwise it would not change with reading direction. Rather, the perceptual span reflects constraints on how linguistic information from the text is obtained and used to recognize and understand words. Further evidence that the perceptual span is limited by cognitive and linguistic factors rather than just by acuity comes from a study that used a clever manipulation to compensate for the drop-off in acuity that occurs in the parafovea (Miellet, O Donnell, & Sereno, 2009). This parafoveal magnification technique is similar to the moving window technique. However, instead of masking the text outside the center of vision, the researchers magnified the text as a function of distance from fixation (Figure 8). On every fixation, parafoveal and peripheral letters should be perceivable to the same degree as foveal letters due to the magnification. It turned out that this manipulation did not increase the size of the perceptual span. If our ability to obtain useful information from the text were limited solely by visual acuity, increasing the visibility of eccentric letters would have allowed them to be perceived better and would have increased the size of the perceptual span. The results of the study suggest that the perceptual span is limited by our ability to identify and process the meaning of the words in the text.

20 20 Figure 8. Depiction of the parafoveal-magnification paradigm. The location of each fixation is indicated with an arrow, and the corresponding display for that fixation is represented. Consecutive lines represent the chronological order of fixations. Note. Figure taken from Miellet et al. (2009). When a word falls within the perceptual span, it can be perceived but not necessarily fully identified. In fact, the area from which words can be identified, the word identification span, is much smaller than the perceptual span. The word identification span is about 7 characters to the right of fixation in English (see Rayner, 1998). Thus, with normal text there is a small window comprised of the currently fixated word and one or two words to the right within which words are identified. The perceptual span is a larger window, used to perceive the visual layout of the text (i.e., where the words and spaces are, in writing systems that have spaces) in order to plan eye movements. The final aspect about the perceptual span that we should point out is that readers do not access any information from the lines above or below the line currently being read (Pollatsek, Raney, LaGasse, & Rayner, 1993). This is important because it is inconsistent with the speed reading claim that someone can read an entire page at once. The findings about the perceptual span suggest that, contrary to the claims of speed reading courses, readers cannot obtain information from a very large area of the visual field, but rather primarily process text in the center of vision (i.e., the fovea).

21 21 Further support for this idea comes from a study using the moving mask paradigm (Rayner & Bertera, 1979). This technique is similar to the moving window technique except that the mask (i.e., the string of x s that replaced the letters in the text) moves in synchrony with the eyes, obscuring the text in foveal vision instead of non-foveal vision. In this study, readers were extremely disrupted by even a single letter in the fovea being masked reading rate dropped in half and continued to drop precipitously as the size of the mask increased. Therefore, readers were not able to read effectively by relying on parafoveal and peripheral vision alone. Although research using the moving window paradigm provides us with an assessment of how much of the text readers can perceive on a given fixation, it tells us little about what type of information is obtained from words before they are fixated and how this information is used in reading. To investigate this, researchers have used the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). Here, people read sentences in which a specific word is manipulated. Initially, it is replaced with a different word (or nonword) called the preview. As illustrated in Figure 9, there is an invisible boundary located just prior to this preview word which, when crossed by the reader s gaze, causes the preview to change to the target word, the word that makes sense in the sentence. Readers are rarely aware that words are changing because the change occurs during a saccade when vision is suppressed (Matin, 1974). However, the change may be noticeable if it is visually drastic (for example, an ascending letter like h changing to a descending letter like y ) or if the eyes were very close to the preview word before the boundary was crossed (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner, 2011).

22 22 Figure 9. Diagram of the boundary paradigm. The vertical dashed line represents the location of the boundary, which is invisible in the experiment. When the reader s gaze (represented by grey circles) crosses this location, between the third-to-last and second-to-last lines, the preview word (kfevl) changes to the target word (front). The general finding from studies using the boundary paradigm is that readers obtain parafoveal preview benefit. That is, they are faster to read the target when the preview was identical to the target than when the preview differed from the target (for a review see Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012). The boundary paradigm allows researchers to manipulate the nature of the relationship between the preview and target in order to gain more detailed information about exactly what type of information causes the preview benefit. We turn now to studies that have addressed this issue, which is important in the context of speed reading technologies that present one word at a time and that do not allow for parafoveal preview. Readers obtain something more abstract from the foveal input than pure visual features. This was cleverly demonstrated by McConkie and Zola (1979), who had readers learn to read something like AlTeRnAtInG case and then either changed the case of each of the letters (making the text read alternating CaSe ) or left the letters unchanged during a saccade. Changing the case of the letters did not affect fixation durations at all, suggesting that readers had discarded the exact visual form of the letters and that their reading behavior was based on

23 23 abstract letter codes (i.e., the identity of the letters; see also Friedman, 1980; Rayner, McConkie, & Zola, 1980; Slattery et al., 2011). But beyond the identity of letters, there is abundant evidence that readers are faster to read a target word when the preview was phonologically related to it. This holds true for readers of alphabetic writing systems like English (Pollatsek, Lesch, Morris, & Rayner, 1992) and French (Sparrow & Miellet, 2002) as well as non-alphabetic systems like Chinese (Pollatsek, Tan, & Rayner, 2000). Although initial evidence suggested that preview benefit does not reflect processing of word meaning (Rayner, Balota, & Pollatsek, 1986; Rayner, Schotter, & Drieghe, 2014), more recent evidence indicates that some aspects of the upcoming word s meaning are processed under certain conditions (Hohenstein & Kliegl, 2014; Rayner & Schotter, 2014; Schotter, 2013; Schotter, Lee, Reiderman, & Rayner, 2015). Finally, research using the boundary paradigm has demonstrated that readers typically do not obtain information from the word two to the right of the fixated word (e.g., Rayner, Juhasz, & Brown, 2007, Angele & Rayner, 2011) unless the words are short (i.e., close to the fovea), common, and/or predictable (Cutter, Drieghe, & Liversedge, 2014; Radach, Inhoff, Glover, & Vorstius, 2013). If observed, preview benefits from the word two in advance of the fixated word are typically smaller in magnitude than preview benefits from the adjacent word. The findings from both the moving window paradigm and the boundary paradigm are quite consistent with the research we discussed earlier regarding the limitations on reading and the fact that people need to move their eyes so as to place the fovea over the region that they want to process. That is, they suggest that people need to move their eyes to look at words directly in order to read efficiently. These findings do not align with some of the central claims of speed reading courses, such as that readers can obtain information from a large area of text in a single fixation. Nor do they align with the claims of some speed reading technologies, such as

24 24 that reading will be more efficient if words are presented one at a time without the possibility for parafoveal preview. Reading speed across people. Is there variability in reading speed? Unsurprisingly, reading speed varies greatly among individuals (Rayner, 1998; see Table 1), most notably as a function of reading skill: Fast readers make shorter fixations, longer saccades, and fewer regressions than slow readers (Everatt & Underwood, 1994; Underwood, Hubbard, & Wilkinson, 1990; see Everatt, Bradshaw, & Hibbard, 1998). Importantly, in a study that examined a large number of cognitive skills, the factor that most strongly determined reading speed was word identification ability (Kuperman & Van Dyke, 2011). This finding suggests that reading speed is intimately tied to language processing abilities, rather than eye movement control abilities. Table 1. Mean fixation duration (in milliseconds), mean saccade length, percent regressions, and reading rate (in words per minute) for 10 skilled readers. Reader Fixation Duration (ms) Saccade Length (characters) Regressions (%) Reading Rate (wpm) KB JC AK TP TT GT GB BB LC JJ Average Note. Table taken from Rayner (1998), p ms = milliseconds, wpm = words per minute. Models of eye movement control. While we have learned a great deal about eye movements and reading over the past few decades, there are still some open questions. However, the research that has been done so far has provided such a detailed understanding that researchers have been able to develop sophisticated models of eye movements during reading. These models are computer programs that do a very good job of predicting how long readers look at words and

25 25 where they move their eyes next. There are a number of such models (see Reichle, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 2003), but two have received the most attention: the E-Z Reader model (Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998) and the SWIFT model (Engbert, Nuthmann, Richter, Kliegl, 2005). Although a full discussion of these models is beyond the scope of the present article, the most important point for present purposes is that, in the models, word identification is a primary determiner of when and where readers move their eyes. We do not set an unchanging pace and length for eye movements in advance of reading a text. Rather, we vary our pace and our movements depending on our ongoing cognitive processes: how well we are processing the incoming information. A second important point is that, in adapting such models to account for the development of reading skill in children, the parameters that need to be modified are those associated with language processing ability rather than those that specify eye movement control ability (Reichle et al., 2013). This finding from the modeling work further supports the idea that language processing rather than the ability to control the movements of one s eyes is the primary driver of reading performance. Given this, we now turn to an overview of one major aspect of language processing, word recognition, and its role in reading. Word Recognition Reading obviously consists of more than recognizing individual words. But, given that a writing system represents the words of a language, words are the basic stepping stones to reading and comprehension. You cannot reasonably expect to understand a text if you do not know what the words mean (imagine trying to read an unfamiliar language). In this section, we detail what is known about word recognition. One of the biggest influences on the time that it takes to recognize a word is its frequency of occurrence, essentially how often the word has been encountered before (Rayner, 1998; 2009).

26 26 In reading, as in listening, words that are more common (e.g., house) require less time to recognize than words that are less common (e.g., abode). The effects of word frequency can be thought of as operating through practice or experience; the more times you have encountered and recognized a word before, the easier it will be for you to do it again in the future. The word frequency effect can be demonstrated for written words seen in isolation by measuring reaction time in tasks like the lexical decision task (Stanners, Jastrzembski, & Westbrook, 1975), the naming task (Berry, 1971; Forster & Chambers, 1973), and the categorization task (Van Orden, 1987). These tasks are depicted in Figure 10. In a lexical decision task, words and nonwords are briefly presented on a computer screen and the participant s goal is to determine whether the letter string is a word or not. In a naming task, the goal is to read the word aloud as quickly and as accurately as possible. In the categorization task, the goal is to determine whether the word is a member of a certain semantic category, for example the category of foods. For words embedded in passages of text, the frequency effect can be measured with eye fixation times during silent reading (Rayner & Duffy, 1986) or by examining event-related brain potentials (ERPs; King & Kutas, 1998) while reading words presented one at a time via RSVP. During silent reading and RSVP, the participant s goal is to understand the sentence in order to recall the text or to answer comprehension questions about it. Despite these differences in the requirements or goals of the task (e.g., determining word status, accessing pronunciation, or accessing meaning), the frequency effect is apparent across all of them. Thus, it is a ubiquitous and robust influence on the word recognition process.

27 27 Figure 10. Diagram of three tasks commonly used to study word reading. For the lexical decision task, the top panel shows a nonword trial and the bottom panel shows a word trial. For the categorization task, the top panel shows an item that fits the category and the bottom panel shows an item that does not. From letters to words. Recognizing a word, in an alphabetic writing system, involves processing the letters within it. As we discussed earlier, the letters in the words of alphabetic writing systems symbolize the sounds that are used to pronounce the word, and the pronunciation is in turn associated with a meaning. We now turn to the question of how people recognize the individual letters within the word and retrieve the pronunciation and meaning. For most words, including short and medium sized ones, all of the letters within the word are recognized simultaneously. For very long words like antidisestablishmentarianism, it may not be possible to recognize all the letters simultaneously (recall that the size of the word identification span is only about 7 letters to the right of eye fixation in English). These words require multiple fixations in order to be recognized. Simultaneous recognition of letters is more efficient within words that are well known than words that are completely new to the reader. In fact, it is actually easier to recognize a letter inside a known word than it is to identify it in isolation! This effect, termed the word superiority effect, was discovered over 125 years ago by Cattell (1886) and later confirmed with more rigorous methods by Reicher (1969) and Wheeler (1970). These experiments have the general design that is shown in Figure 11.

28 28 Figure 11. Diagram of the paradigm used by Cattell (1886), Reicher (1969) and Wheeler (1970) to demonstrate the word superiority effect. From top to bottom, the first three panels show successive displays in the experiment. The fourth pair of panels shows the participant s potential responses. A person sees either a word (e.g., word ), a nonword with the same letters in a jumbled order (e.g., orwd ), or a single letter (e.g., d ) presented very briefly on a computer screen so briefly that there is not enough time to make an eye movement. Next, a mask stimulus (e.g., ####) replaces it, barring the person from holding onto the information about the word in any type of raw visual form. The person is cued to a particular position in the stimulus (e.g., the last position) and asked to report which of two possible letters had been presented at that location (e.g., d or k ). Note that in this example (and for all the items in Reicher s and Wheeler s experiments), either of the response options in the word condition would make a real word (e.g., either word or work ). This means that using knowledge about what letter could be there in English words could not help a person for perform above the level of chance, which is 50%. But performance in the word condition was much better than chance and much better than in either the nonword condition or (quite surprisingly!) the isolated letter condition. Even more impressive than the word superiority effect is the fact that, once established, the word recognition system is so efficient that it can interfere with processes that seem to be

29 29 very basic, such as color recognition. The clearest demonstration of this is the Stroop effect, named after the scientist who discovered it (Stroop, 1935), and replicated hundreds of times since (see MacLeod, 1991 for a review). This effect is so robust that it can be demonstrated easily in classrooms with a single piece of paper and a timer. Figure 12. An example of the Stroop paradigm. The task is to name the color of the ink that the word is printed in as quickly and accurately as possible. Column 1 is the congruent condition (the word and ink indicate the same color), column 2 is the neutral condition (the stimulus is a colored string of x s), and column 3 is the incongruent condition (the word and ink indicate different colors). In the Stroop task, the goal is to name the color of the ink in which each word is printed as fast and as accurately as possible you can try it yourself by using Figure 12. Start with the first column and time yourself. Then try the second column, and then try the third. You may notice that each column feels more difficult than the last and takes you more time. This is because when the word names a color that is different from the color you are trying to say, as in the third column, you have difficulty selecting the correct response. You do not experience such competition in the first column (because the word and ink color lead to the same response) or in the second column (because the string of X s does not bring a particular word to mind). What is so surprising about this effect, besides how robust and easily demonstrated it is, is that we would generally think that color naming should be so easy that the words should be

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